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An unsettling study of two tragic events at an Indian residential school in British Columbia which serve as a microcosm of the profound impact the residential school system had on Aboriginal communities in Canada throughout this century. The book's focal points are the death of a runaway boy and the suicide of another while they were students at the Williams Lake Indian Residential School during the early part of this century. Imbedded in these stories is the complex relationship between the Department of Indian Affairs, the Oblates, and the Aboriginal communities that in turn has influenced relations between government, church, and Aboriginals today.

The Myth of the Mounties as neutral arbiters between Aboriginal peoplesand incoming settlers remains a cornerstone of the western Canadiannarrative of a peaceful frontier experience that differs dramaticallyfrom its American equivalent. Walter Hildebrandt eviscerates this myth,placing the NWMP and early settlement in an international framework ofimperialist plunder and the imposition of colonialist ideology. FortBattleford, as an architectural endeavour, and as a Euro-Canadiansettlement, oozed British and central Canadian values. The Mounties,like the Ottawa government that paid their salaries, “were in theWest to assure that a new cultural template of social behaviour wouldreplace the one they found.” The newcomers were blind to thecultural values and material achievements of the millennia-longresidents of the North-West. Unlike their fur trade predecessors, thesettler state had little need to respect or accommodate Aboriginalpeople. Following policies that resulted in starvation for Natives, thecolonizers then responded brutally to the uprising of some of theoppressed in 1885. Hildebrandt’s ability to view these eventsfrom the indigenous viewpoint places the Mounties, the Canadian state,and the regional settlement experience under an entirely different spotlight.

It is not mere coincidence that two-thirds of the population of British Columbia occupies lands bordering its great inland sea, the Strait of Georgia, and connected waterways collectively known as the North Salish Sea. Averaging forty kilometres in width and stretching some three hundred kilometres from Vancouver and Victoria in the south to Powell River and Campbell River in the north, the North Salish Sea has long sheltered a bounty of habitable lands and rich maritime resources ideal for human settlement. While the region's intricate shoreline of peninsulas, promontories, estuaries and plains has been occupied by human communities for millennia, the last century and a half has been an unprecedented age of rapid colonization, industrialization and globalization. Many books have been written about individual communities and industries around the great waterway, but none have examined the region as a geographical unit with its own dynamic systems, which can best be understood as an interrelated whole.

The Strait of Georgia has influenced human affairs, even as people have changed the Strait, in a complex relationship that continues today. British colonization and the commodification of the Strait's resources launched a resource rush around the sea that began in earnest in the decades before the First World War, often at the expense of Indigenous populations. Coal mining developed earliest and grew rapidly. Fishing, lumbering and metal mining were also established by the 1880s and soon experienced exponential growth. From the earliest salmon canneries to today's cruise ship industry, all have depended on the Strait to ensure economic prosperity and the easy movement of people and goods.

As competition for space and resources increases, and as the effects of climate change are amplified, the pressure on this ecologically vulnerable area will only intensify. If this precious sea is to be passed to future generations with any semblance of its inherent richness and diversity intact, then it will need to be effectively managed and vigorously defended. The first step is to understand the complex story of the region, making this essential reading not only for history buffs but anyone with an interest in the future of British Columbia.

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence.

Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action.

With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance.

Reviews“This book makes an important – indeed, urgent – contribution to knowledge about violence against Indigenous women that ought to become required reading for politicians, activists, policy-makers, scholars, writers, and artists engaged in responding to this ongoing crisis.”
— Amber Dean, McMaster University, author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance

"Hargreaves ... examines how stories of individual tragedies have been memorialized in venues such as human rights reports, poems, films, and plays. She convincingly explains that statistics and research projects produced with the best intentions may serve to reinforce the very colonial power dynamics that prevent the emergence of transformative solutions in the struggle to end violence against Indigenous women. ... For those in the field of comparative narrative criticism, it’s a work sure to inspire much discussion, debate, and reflection."
— Publisher's Weekly

Educator InformationThis book would be useful for Indigenous Studies, Women's Studies, Literary Criticism, and Canadian Literature courses, or courses where activism is a key theme.

There is a special place on the southeastern shores of Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It is a magnificent landscape of rocky cliffs fronting onto the wild Pacific Ocean, sheltered beaches, lakes, mountains and forests. Since the beginning of time, it has been the ancestral home of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation.Drawing directly from oral history passed down by generations of Huu-ay-aht chiefs and elders, Kathryn Bridge and Kevin Neary tell the compelling stories of the Huu-ay-aht people from their perspective. This is a fascinating glimpse into the complex and rich history of a West Coast First Nation, from creation tales and accounts of their traditional ways to the recent Maa'nulth treaty.

When buffalo were many on the western plains, when Cree and Blackfoot warred in unrelenting enmity, when the Sun Dance and the shaking tent were still a way of life these were the days of Chief Thundershild (1849-1927). His stories of a fierce and vanished freedom are reprinted here, exactly as he told them to Edward Ahenakew in 1923. His voice, simple and poetic, resonates with the wide expanse of sky, the song of the wind, the sound of water.

The other voice in this volume is equally moving, but in a very different way. It is the voice of Old Keyam, pained and angry, raised in protest against the Indians' lethargy and the white man's insensitivity. A fictional character, semi-autobiographical, he is very much the voice of Edward Ahenakew, telling of life on the reservations in the new white world of the early twentieth century.